An Idaho woman and her son have been charged with kidnapping after prosecutors say they took the son’s minor girlfriend to Oregon to get an abortion

This is, unfortunately, a situation where, if the charges were brought in a jurisdiction where abortion was legal, the legitimacy, or more perhaps fundamentally, honesty of the charges would not be questionable: we could trust that the accused might be guilty or innocent, but that when the prosecutors claim rape, they mean rape, when they claim CSAM, they mean CSAM, and when they claim a forced abortion, they mean a forced abortion, within the understandings of a reasonable person. Yet because the jurisdiction bans abortion as a particularly intense political issue, and is likely quite sexually repressive, everything ends up needing to be read much more skeptically, and even if the charges are legitimate, people end up trusting them less.

Here, on the one hand, it might be a case of a teenager who was exploited, raped, had sexually explicit images made without consent, and was forced to have an abortion. Were this another jurisdiction, we could at least know that is what the accusation was. But here, it is also possible, on the other extreme, that the accusation is actually that two teenagers, with two years age difference, were in a sexual relationship (the rape), had been sending images to each other consensually (the CSAM), and had a discussion where the girl decided to have an abortion without her parents' consent (the kidnapping). In a particularly extreme case, it's even potentially possible that, if the state is sufficiently regressive, the girl could be speaking under the threat of being charged with producing CSAM herself. If these are what the prosecutors actually mean, given the information in the article, it appears that the mother and son may have already essentially confessed to being guilty of them.

And elements of the story here make the prosecutors' suggestions seem a bit suspect. Notably, the choice of second-degree kidnapping in Idaho appears to include the case where the girl involved consented, but her parents did not (or did not know), while, had rape been involved, it appears they would have been able make a charge of first-degree kidnapping. The rape and CSAM charges seem to be added to the article almost as afterthoughts, in a single sentence, almost as if the prosecutors would prefer that attention not be drawn to them, when it would seem like those would make the situation far more severe and easy to explain. The article appears to skirt around whether the girl claimed that the abortion was not consensual, or that there was sexual abuse involved, only directly stating that her mother claimed these.

I'm reminded of the abortion charges where Facebook drew criticism for releasing information to the state, and Facebook responded with the claim that they had been tricked, with the authorities involved telling them that it was a matter of urgent child endangerment (with the authorities not mentioning that they meant an "unborn child"). In that case, if I recall, the actual accusation was for something that would be illegal in even jurisdictions with liberal laws around abortion, yet the politics involved, and the approach the authorities took, made the public trust the accusation less, and brought political outrage where there could have been agreement.

The sad thing is that this case could well be, may even likely be, a clear case of severe abuse and exploitation of a teenager. But because of the jurisdiction and the politics involved, people will read this article and legitimately be skeptical.